''OK'' Meaning

You know ''Ok'' and you use it to say ''yes'' .But are you know this word meaning.It's meaning also ''Never Mind'', ''Free'' and much more

The Story:

The scholarly consensus, based on Allen Walker Read , identifies the earliest known use of OK in print as 1839, in the March 23 edition of the Boston Morning Post (an American newspaper).The announcement of a trip by the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society (a "frolicsome group" according to Read) received attention from the Boston papers. Charles Gordon Greene wrote about the event using the line that is widely regarded as the first instance of this strain of okay , complete with gloss :

The above is from the Providence Journal , the editor of which is a little too quick on the trigger, on this occasion. We said not a word about our deputation passing "through the city" of Providence.—We said our brethren were going to New York in the Richmond, and they did go, as per Post of Thursday. The "Chairman of the Committee on Charity Lecture Bells," is one of the deputation, and perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his train -band, would have his "contribution box," et ceteras, ok —all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks , upward.

Read gives a number of subsequent appearances in print. Seven instances were accompanied with glosses that were variations on "all correct" such as "oll korrect" or "ole kurreck," but five appeared with no accompanying explanation, suggesting that the word was expected to be well known to readers and possibly in common colloquial use at the time.

Formerly, various claims of earlier usage had been made. For example, it was claimed that the phrase appeared in a 1790 court record from Sumner County, Tennessee , discovered in 1859 by a Tennessee historian named Albigence Waldo Putnam , in which Andrew Jackson apparently said "proved a bill of sale from Hugh McGary to Gasper Mansker, for an uncalled good, which was OK". However, Read challenged such claims, and his assertions have been generally accepted.

David Dalby (see above) brought up some other earlier attested usages. One example from 1941 is the apparent notation "we arrived ok" in the hand-written diary of William Richardson going from Boston to New Orleans in 1815, about a month after the Battle of New Orleans. Frederic Cassidy asserts that he personally tracked down this diary and notes that:

After many attempts to track down this diary, Read and I at last discovered that it is owned by the grandson of the original writer, Professor L. Richardson, Jr., of the Department of Classical Studies at Duke University. Through his courtesy we were able to examine this manuscript carefully, to make greatly enlarged photographs of it, and to become convinced (as is Richardson) that, whatever the marks in the manuscript are, they are not OK.

Similarly, HL Mencken , who originally considered it "very clear that 'ok' is actually in the manuscript", later recanted his endorsement of the expression, asserting that it was used no earlier than 1839. Mencken (following Read) described the diary entry as a misreading of the author's self-correction, and stated it was in reality the first two letters of the words ah[andsome] before noticing the phrase had been used in the previous line and changing his mind.

Another example given by Dalby is a Jamaican planter's diary of 1816, which records a black slave saying "Oh ki, massa, doctor no need be fright, we no want to hurt him". Cassidy asserts that this is a misreading of the source, which actually begins "Oh, ki, massa ...", where ki is a phrase by itself:

In all other examples of this interjection that I have found, it is simply ki (once spelled kie ). As here, it expresses surprise, amusement, satisfaction, mild expostulation, and the like. It has nothing like the meaning of the adjective OK, which in the earliest recorded examples means 'all right, good,' though it later acquires other meanings, but even when used as an interjection does not express surprise, expostulation, or anything similar.

West African

A verifiable written attestation of the particle 'kay' is from a North Carolina slave not wanting to be flogged by a European visiting America in 1784:

Kay, massa, you just leave me, me sit here, great fish jump up into da canoe, here he be, massa, fine fish, massa; me den very grad; den me sit very still, until another great fish jump into de canoe;...

A West African (Mande and/or Bantu) etymology has been argued in scholarly sources, tracing the word back to the Wolof and Bantu word waw-kay or the Mande (aka "Mandinke" or "Mandingo") phrase o ke .

David Dalby first made the claim that the particle "okay" could have African origins in the 1969 Hans Wolff Memorial Lecture. His argument was reprinted in various newspaper articles between 1969 and 1971.This suggestion has also been mentioned more recently by Joseph Holloway, who argued in the 1993 book The African Heritage of American English (co-written with a retired missionary) that various West African languages have near-homophone discourse markers with meanings such as "yes indeed" or which serve as part of the back-channeling repertoire.Though Frederic Cassidy challenged Dalby's claims, asserting that there is no documentary evidence that any of these African-language words had any causal link with its use in the American press, one can certainly wonder at the fact that this standard of written proof does not account for the illiteracy in which the West African speakers were kept during the period of slavery in question.
 The West African hypothesis had not been accepted by 1981 by any etymologists, but nevertheless has since appeared in scholarly sources published by linguists and non-linguists alike.

and I things in the elsewhere in the world have own meaning.Thanks you for reading!

                                                                                               From:Wikipedia